From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kurt Gänzl (born 15 February 1946) is an
award-winning writer, musicologist, casting director and singer
best known for his books about musical theatre.

After a long acting and singing career and a career as a casting
director of West End shows, Gänzl has become one
of the world's most important chroniclers of the history of musical
theatre. According to Canal Académie, "Kurt Gänzl is an
institution. No one interested in musicals and operetta can ignore
that. He is the world reference – with some few others, like Gerald
Bordmann, Ken Bloom, or Andrew Lamb – for that
subject".[1]

Contents

Biography

Gänzl was born Brian Roy Gallas[2] in
Wellington, New Zealand and is of Austrian
descent, the son of Frederick, an educator, and Nancy Gallas, née
Welsh.[2] He
studied law and classics at Canterbury
University in New Zealand, receiving a masters degree in 1967
while performing as a radio and concert vocalist.[1]

Advertisements

Career

Early in his career, Gänzl wrote plays. His one-act plays
Elektra and The Women of Troy were produced in
New Zealand in 1966 and 1967 by Elmwood Players. The latter play
won the British Drama League (now British Theatre
Association/Drama Magazine) award in 1967.[2]
The next year, Ganzl joined the New Zealand Opera Company as a bass
soloist. After the company closed, he moved to London and studied
for a year at the London Opera Centre. For twenty
years, he worked as a performer, including a long run in London's
hit show, The Black
and White Minstrels. His last show was Harold Fielding's
Hans Andersen at the London Palladium. He then worked as a
talent agent and as a casting director for over a dozen musicals
and plays in London's West End theatres and for musical and
operatic productions in Europe and America.[1]

Beginning in 1986, while still working as a casting director,
Gänzl began writing theatre reference works. In that year, he
published his two-volume history, The British Musical
Theatre (Macmillan Press, 1986), which won the Roger Machell
Prize for the year's best performing-arts book and the British
Library Association’s McColvin Medal for the outstanding reference
work (any subject) of its season. It also won the Library
Association McClovin Medal.[2]
This was followed by Gänzl's Book of the Musical Theater
(1988 with critic Andrew
Lamb), Encyclopaedia of World's Musicals (1994), and
The Musical: A Concise History (1997). Gänzl has published
over a dozen important books on musical theatre. He has also
contributed many biographical entries to the Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography.

Gänzl's seminal reference work, The Encyclopedia of the
Musical Theatre, was published in 1994 and greatly expanded in
a second edition in 2001. It was a Dartmouth Medal honoree in 1995
and was awarded "Outstanding Reference Source" in 1997 by the
American Library Association. Theatre historian John Kenrick describes it
as follows: "Only serous research libraries carry this set listing
thousands of shows and individuals. This expanded update of the
1995 original edition is the best source to date on European
musicals, with solid coverage of Broadway too."[3] Another
critic calls it "the most exhaustive study anyone has yet made of
musicals, and it is difficult to imagine it being done in a better
or more thorough way."[4]

The Times
wrote, "So, with The Encyclopaedia of the Musical Theatre, Kurt
Ganzl... has transcended all rivals. His work embraces not only
Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue, but Vienna and Budapest, Paris and
Rome, Sydney and Toronto. He even apologises for including only
three New Zealand entries. If there is a musical production of any
kind that he does not know about, then it is odds-on that nobody
else does either."[5] Gänzl
has said, "My goals are to make the musical theater a respectable
academic subject and to put the musical theater into its
international context. I want to bring the so-called 'musical' and
'operetta' back together as part of the same art form and to dispel
some of the early myths and quasi-historical errors and distortions
that have become accepted as part of musical theater history."[2]

At the end of the 1980s, Gänzl moved to St. Paul de Vence in the
south of France to concentrate on writing full time. He later moved
to New Zealand, where he owns several harness racing horses[6] and is
preparing a multi-volume encyclopedia of Victorian vocalists. His
partner of 30 years, the theatrical agent Ian Bevan, died in 2006
aged 87.[7].